JOVR is Promoting Closer Academic and Scientific Ties between Europe and Iran

In February 2010, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences (SBUMS) organised in Tehran a very high standard conference on ocular inflammation and uveitis. Several members of the executive committee of the Society for Ophthalmo-Immunoinfectiology in Europe (SOIE) took active part in that meeting and we thoroughly enjoyed the superb hospitality given to us by our Iranian colleagues. After 3 days of friendly contacts, stimulating exchanges and mutual convergence of opinions and interests, the idea emerged to work on one issue of Journal of Ophthalmic and Vision Research (JOVR) devoted to uveitis and inflammatory eye diseases. This partnership between the SOIE and SBUMS led to the project resulting today and publication of the present issue. Such collaborative work, building bridges between clinicians and researchers from different parts of the world, corresponds exactly to the philosophy of the SOIE, a society dedicated to teaching and promotion of knowledge in the field of uveitis and inflammatory eye diseases in Europe and beyond. expand its range of activities, a sister society the Society for ophthalmo-immunoinfectiology in Europe and the Middle-East (SOIEME) was established in 2011, in order to intensify contacts in that part of the world, an example of which is the collaboration that led to the present achievement. This issue was planned to include and combine articles by Iranian authors on one side and from authors in connection with the SOIE on the other side. After a little more than one year of work and efforts, we succeeded to build an issue consisting of 14 peer-reviewed articles, equally divided between contributors from Iran and from the SOIE. In this editorial, articles originating from the SOIE will be commented, while Professor Masoud Soheilian, the other guest-editor of this issue, will present Iranian contributions in his editorial. In their original article, Papadia M and colleagues 1 present a topic that, to the best of their knowledge, has never been dealt with at least in the last 30 years, namely the relation between myopia and inflammation. They describe on one hand myopic changes induced by inflammation including the myopic shift induced by sclero-choroidal inflammation that for example can occur in hyperacute Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada (VKH) disease or more rarely, by drugs such as acetazolamide or sulphonamides used in some cases of inflammation. On the other hand, they expose the most common clinical entities for which myopia can be a predisposing factor, such as multifocal choroiditis (MFC) and multiple …